Patient field vs responsible party field

A patient IS the responsible party. His name was spelled incorrectly when entered into system. Once he comes in, we see the correct spelling of his name and fix it. Unfortunately, this correction is not carried over into the responsible party field. While it's easy to fix it in the RP field, it was not clear to me that the program copies the original entry and makes a separate file of RPs. This is confusing, and I think checking the self on the RP option should link them so that the patient field information is always current/correct.

Re: Patient field vs responsible party field

Unfortunately, what you are asking is not possible because of the way OrthoTrac creates records for patients and responsible parties. Patient information and responsible party information are stored in two separate tables in the database, regardless of whether the patient is their own responsible party or not. When a patient is initially created with the option "Patient is Responsible Party", the two records are created with identical information, but they are still separate. Updating the name for one does not affect the other.

The exception is for the phone number / address areas. If you created the responsible party with the options for "SameHome Phone" / "Same Address", then changing the patient OR responsible party's phone number or address will bring up the usual window asking if you want to change it for all associated parties.

Re: Patient field vs responsible party field

Thanks. Had another issue where a claim was rejected because the date of birth field was corrected in the patient screen, but never changed on the RP screen, because I thought I had corrected it. Good to know in the future but just conveying that from a user standpoint, this isn't obvious that it is not interlinked.